So I try to make heads or tails of this situation. I got randomly banned from a community where I posted a youtube video showing something from a Convention. Then I wanted to post a question today but realised that I couldn't since I was banned. That community is sadly the biggest of all Star Citizen communities (the next one would be from lemmy.world)
I took a look at the Mod log and see the following line in it:
So no clean up of violating comments or posts, just a strict out ban.
The community has a pretty standard ruleset:
further, the moderator @[email protected] hasn't posted anything since a year, so what gives here, or was it some other mod that was able to declare the ban?
Everyone is better off not using .ml
The only ways that I know of to user-block Lemmy.ml:
non-Lemmy PieFed (you can block any custom instance you wish - it lacks some polish compared to Lemmy but it's really growing up strong and is even ahead in some ways, e.g. this one) or Sublinks, in the meantime Tesseract on dubvee.org that says it will switch to use the latter eventually. Edit: I forgot to mention Mbin, b/c I am not sure if it can or not. Someone said that originally Kbin could user-block whole instances, but there seem to be reports that Mbin cannot for whatever reason, and I have not made an account to check it out personally or a post to ask someone.
lemmy.cafe that is very welcoming and has blocked all of the big 3, + threads, and interestingly, virtually nothing else. I think this should be among the new default recommendations really, the only downside seems to be that it has only a single admin so perhaps less stable than e.g. lemm.ee (though the latter allows lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - which for some people is a good thing, but for people who want the opposite of that, without other additional restrictions, that's lemme.cafe). It is notably running 0.19.6-beta.9 though, so the admin seems super on the ball, and it has really nice welcoming messages too, guiding people to a variety of helpful resources. Edit: oh I forgot about your instance, quokk.au, also only a single user, though it doesn't block lemmygrad.ml for whatever reason, but yes that's another option.
someone said that the Boost app allows user-blocking of instances. I cannot confirm personally nor know of others - Voyager (on Android) cannot, but what about e.g. Sync?
Lemmy ostensibly has a "user block of instances", except it doesn't really at all - all it does is block communities, not users, and what little protection it did offer irt the latter has actually weakened over time (e.g. for those in Lemmy.World running 0.19.3, users from blocked instances cannot trigger a "notification", whereas for most people outside of that running 0.19.5 they can). At this point I don't expect anything that will allow blocking lemmy.ml users to ever be released on any instance running the Lemmy codebase - the only options seem to be move to an instance offering defederation, leave Lemmy entirely, or suck it up and swallow what you're given.
It makes sense that most instance admins do not want to defederate though, b/c some communities are still held hostage on the lemmy.ml instance - e.g. [email protected] with 3.6K MAU (monthly active users) vs. the next largest one [email protected] with only 0.7K MAU, that's an enormous difference! Actually it would be best if communities, especially niche ones, were not held hostage by ANY kind of political maneuvering - except there is literally nothing these days that is not political, it would seem, including "facts" themselves.
But yeah, one reason to move communities off is that the mods themselves could accidentally get booted, or at the very least their users could at any point say something that sets off the ban hammer - and then never be allowed to post or comment in the community again? Unless it's a community called I_fucking_love_Russia_and_China_too, it's a risk that can seriously fragment the Fediverse, to tie that content to a certain brand of political thinking.
Especially one that is nowhere written down, and could change at any given moment, also without any prior notification.
But so long as you continue to use the Lemmy software, what right does anyone have to complain about how the devs wish to implement their own code, which they wrote for themselves, for their own desires and ends?
If we want better, we have to make things that are better, on our own.
There is a also another way, I saw someone suggesting that a person could contact a remote instance's admins and have their accounts and data removed from the instance. Essentially requesting a ban.
The big drawback to all but one of the methods listed above is that they are false-assurance or cosmetic/curation blocks, not functional blocks. And with some of the more problematic instances out there, false-assurance is almost worse than nothing at all. With your posts and comments removed from your instance you'll never receive replies or attacks from users on that instance, they'll just never see your content anymore.
That's why admins need to defederate it more often. If Lemmy.world alone gave them the boot it would slash their userbase in those communities significantly. It's very likely that the moderators there would move or a large amount of other users would move. They're not going to though unless they have to, and making it easier by keeping the door open only slows that down from happening.
I would say every reason since the nature of open-source code means you can fork it and use it how ever you want. Especially given that many people are contributors. I say if you want complete control and don't want to hear complaints about your code and platform don't license as GPL and make contributors waive their IP ownership to the devs when contributing code. They didn't do any of this though.
Sublinks is looking very promising as a replacement for Lemmy not only is it written in a more well known language than Rust it's also aiming to have more features while remaining mostly compatible with the Lemmy API.
I don't know how you would force compliance with a different instance though, especially if it is not located in the EU.
In the end we can only control ourselves - e.g. note I'm writing this from a PieFed account:-). But yes Sublinks is a very exciting development as well, though I have not heard any developments for many months when it was mentioned that it was not stable yet.
And yes someone could fork the Lemmy codebase. Many instances including Lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org have done exactly that, though unlike Mbin (since Kbin is now defunct) they don't want to get too far ahead of the main branch so that they can still receive future updates easier, whereas PieFed and Sublinks and Mbin are each entirely separate projects from Lemmy to begin with, though they are interoperable with those federated communities which is awesome 😎.
If you're in the US and they're in the US or countries that have copyright treaties you can request removal under DMCA since you own your posts and comment content. And if you don't agree to their TOS or licensing it's a kind of a grey area for them. Still not completely foolproof since if Instance admins are willing to go further than you're willing to go (i.e. not complying without a lawsuit), you can't really do much about it.
Yeah especially because Rust is much harder to contribute to. Once Sublinks gets off the ground I feel like there will be more people eager and willing to contribute code. I'm hoping that it's still going since there would be great benefit in this project being an option.
I believe Programming.dev does it too, they call it Pangora though they're currently restructuring it to be a fork of Sublinks so they haven't worked on it much at the moment. Also Tesseract is an alternate frontend of the Lemmy software, not a different software. It does improve Lemmy greatly though.
So what will make Sublinks better than e.g. PieFed? Or Mbin for that matter? All 3 of these I thought used Python rather than Rust, as Lemmy does.
I think the main benefit is Lemmy API compatibility and the fact that it's compatible with Lemmy's database structure. Meaning that an instance could choose to migrate from Lemmy to Sublinks. When it comes to any other software they can't really. They'd have to start from scratch as a platform.
Ah, thank you. I'm not 100% certain that's entirely a positive, but indeed it makes sense why e.g. Tesseract on dubvee.org would want to eye using that, when it comes out.
Whereas Mbin provides more cross-platform compatibility with Mastodon, and PieFed with other similar integrations, e.g. PixelFed and upcoming Loops underneath that.